Standard 802.1Q promulgated by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (Std. 802.1Q) entitled “Virtual Bridged Local Area Networks” defines a convention for supporting, among other things, traffic prioritization in bridged local area networks (LANs). The standard includes a convention for instantiating a tag in a packet in the creation of a Std. 802.1Q-compliant packet. The tag may include, among other things, a virtual LAN (VLAN) identifier and a priority. Generally speaking, the VLAN identifier is applied to determine where the packet may be transmitted and the priority is applied to determine how fast the packet will be processed relative to other packets.
As a Std. 802.1Q-compliant packet passes through each bridge in a a network, the convention provides for “regenerating” the tag priority in the packet as received (i.e. the inbound tag priority) and instantiating the regenerated priority in the packet as transmitted (i.e. the outbound tag priority). According to the standard, the outbound tag priority may differ from the inbound tag priority and may be independently determined on each bridge based on the physical port through which the bridge received the packet and the inbound tag priority. There is no provision in the standard, however, to use other values in determining the outbound tag priority. It may be desirable to determine an outbound tag priority based on values other than the inbound tag priority and the receiving physical port.